During the lockdown phase of the pandemic, while the rest of us were learning to bake sourdough bread and coming to terms with the intricacies of Zoom, Tan Dun was composing a trombone concerto inspired by thousand-year-old Chinese paintings of musical instruments and the idea of video games. Three Muses in Video Game uses the trombone as a stand-in for the bili, the xiqin and the sheng, respectively the ancestors or close relatives of the oboe, the erhu and the harmonica. The soloist comments on, participates in, and occasionally disrupts music that in each of the three movements coalesces into the sort of looped dramatic progression that is the backbone of action-oriented video game scores, flavored slightly by some themes that sound like traditional Chinese melodies.
At its best this comes across as a novel gloss on the type of continuous variation that was common in Baroque passacaglias or chaconnes, but it sometimes lapses into wearying repetition, too close to its source material to escape the pull of cliché. Still, it's great fun to listen to the trombone put to such use. Joseph Alessi, the New York Philharmonic's principal trombone, gave an unassuming but self-assured performance, hitting marks that included lip trills, triple tonguing, rapid register changes and a wide range of tone colors and glissandi.
Joel Thompson shares with Tan Dun the goal of bringing influences from his upbringing (in his case, in the Bahamas and the American South) into his orchestral music. To See the Sky: an exegesis for orchestra, given its world premiere here, is meant to “outline a non-linear journey towards healing”.
Other than than some passages of 12/8 groove, I didn't hear those influences; I heard some Ravel in the form of major ninth chords, some Copland in the form of low string chords moving in parallel, and what sounded like the scores to a TV suspense show (at the beginning) and a Hallmark movie (at the end). None of which is to say that I didn't enjoy the piece. It has a constantly shifting palette of grooves, colors and moods, which Jaap van Zweden seemed to be having the time of his life negotiating. There is a lot of terrific orchestral writing; standout moments for me were an eerily high English horn solo and a triumphant brass chorale interrupted by a snarky, dissonant harp chord. I did wince at the lack of subtlety when the ominous three-note motive that had dominated the first two movements was used in retrograde to end the piece.
Van Zweden and the orchestra have tuned themselves to their new hall a couple years into their residency there, and they sound terrific, as soloists, as sections, and as one giant orchestral animal. But either too much subtlety, or perhaps not enough, tarred the performance of Mendelssohn's Symphony no. 3 in A minor, “Scottish”. (My notes say, “Everyone sounds great and I'm bored.”) Van Zweden, like many contemporary conductors and performers, seems determined to eschew the hyper-Romantic excesses that used to be common in this repertoire, and understandably so; but without that, the emphasis needs to be on architecture and momentum. Here, we got restrained but incomprehensible tempo shifts in odd places, and long stretches that seemed to just drift along. There were satisfying moments; the beginning of the second movement was nicely frantic, and the fourth movement finally developed a sense of narrative just in time to build to a rewarding climax. Sometimes a straight-down-the-middle approach just isn't as much fun as veering off into the alleys.
